


State-Transition Function

by Sineala



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen, Languages and Linguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 10:08:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura learns to be a xenolinguist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	State-Transition Function

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pauraque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pauraque/gifts).



"What do you want to be when you grow up?" adults always asked her.

She had carefully memorized the profession in Federation Standard; it had almost too many syllables for her mouth. "Communications officer. On a starship."

Sometimes they didn't understand her immediately. Sometimes they looked at her like they didn't even know what one did. For those people, she had a shorter answer: " _Mfasiri_ ," she would say. A translator. It was not exactly correct, but it would do. They always understood that.

At the age of six, Nyota Uhura knew she would join Starfleet.

There was a universe out there. She wanted to talk to it.

She had studied, of course, Swahili first and then Federation Standard to fluency, and then patchwork bits of other languages: Vulcan, Klingon, Andorian. She learned to play the harp, and picked out sentences in the tones of Solresol, the centuries-old auxlang.

Academy xenolinguistics was nothing like this. She had thought, naively, that with the universal translator there was not much to be done except learn to input tagged grammars, but her first instructor acted as if the UT never existed: they learned articulation, waveforms, resonating cavities. They learned about old machine translation, n-grams, top-down versus bottom-up parsing.

In the sleepless run-up toward midterm exams, her roommate found her in the library curled around her PADD, frantically trying to make finite-state automata make sense.

"I don't see why I have to learn this," Uhura said, bleakly, and her roommate closed one green-skinned hand gently on her shoulder.

"Finish the chapter," she said, daring her, "and I'll teach you four words in Orion."

The UT had very little Orion data; the slavers were stingy with their language and would not trade what could be sold. She could learn it. She could make the computer better. She could do this. She would do this.

"Do I get to pick the words?" 

The other woman only grinned. "I'll let you know."

She would ask for the word for freedom. Her name.

**Author's Note:**

> Per Memory Beta, Uhura's TOS roommate was also an Orion.
> 
> I am not now and have never been a computational linguist.


End file.
